When Chen Shu returned to Yujing University, Brother Meng was still the only one in the dorm.
Brother Meng was copying the Sacred Character Stele.
"Well, well! If it isn't Junior Brother Meng, a first-year Spell Principles Studies student at the Traditional Cultivation College! Why are you practicing calligraphy instead of studying spells? Anyone who didn't know better would think you were from the Literature College..."
Chen Shu leaned over to look.
The Sacred Character Stele was the textbook of written and spoken language that the Sacred Ancestor had established after "creating characters."
Ancient technology had been limited. Even after the Sacred Ancestor invented a simple printing technique, copies were still often made by hand. And copying by hand introduced all kinds of uncertainty. Anyone who had ever copied homework knew that one wrong character could turn it into a martial arts manual. To prevent that, the ancients carved some important classics into stone steles, setting a standard for everyone to follow. If an error crept into a text, the stele could be used to correct it.
That was why many classics carved on ancient steles served as authoritative textbooks.
If archaeologists found two versions of a poem, one written in a book and the other carved on a stele, scholars would generally favor the inscription as the original unless they had other evidence.
The Sacred Character Stele was no different.
But because it recorded language and writing rather than a literary work, it also served to standardize them.
Without the Sacred Character Stele, spoken and written language would have drifted far over the generations. The Sacred Ancestor had placed the stele atop Mount Tai and cast it from Star Iron, making it impossible to destroy or move without the power of a deity. He had also decreed that all